‘Elena, your health!’ He drank. ‘They also call it the City of Light. But Saul goes on about the gloom. Foggy, dripping…’
‘La grisaille.’
‘He called it one of the grimmest cities on earth.*5 I don’t remember it like that.’
‘I do. I was miserable here.’
‘Come on, you’ve been to London, haven’t you? Isn’t London just a latitude worse? Anyway I remember the light here as painterly. You could always –’
‘Painterly, my ass.’
‘That’s what Saul said. Gay Paris? Gay, my foot. But Anthony, that painter friend of mine, he said he never got as blue here as he did in London – because he could always go outside and get something from the light.’
‘With me it was simpler. I didn’t know any people and I didn’t know any French. Well it was better than Jed’s, but I couldn’t chat in it.’
They had both lived in Paris for the same few months in 1979/80, and in the same quarter (the Latin). They never met. Elena, at least at first, was wretchedly installed in la place Saint-Michel. Whereas Martin, flush with screenplay money, and writing his fourth novel, was renting a flat that belonged to the ex-wife of an Italian film star (Ugo Tognazzi), on rue Mouffetard, up by the Panthéon (and much of the time he was sharing it with Phoebe Phelps). He said,
‘Your speech was perfect, and everyone did fall in love with you. You were very sweet to our hosts.’ He rolled and lit a cigarette. ‘Impossible to tell what they’re going through, inside. Imagine. A great warrior nation. Charlemagne, Napoleon. They were much better than me in World War I. But it was sauve qui peut in 1940. Then – spontaneous collaboration. A joint effort – with the Nazis.’
‘In other words, they banded together to round me up.’
‘Too true, kid. As a way of embracing their humiliation…Where’s that really murky part of Paris? The redlight-and-rentboy part. The gypsy part.’
‘Pigalle. And we’re in it. It’s right across the street. Look.’
He looked – the heaps of rubbish, the shimmer of trespass and perversity…
‘Nostalgie de la boue,’ she said. ‘Love of slime. The French love of rottenness.’
‘Yeah, love of murk. Their writers have it too. I was thinking last night. There’s hardly any murk in our literature, El. I have Lawrence and you have Kerouac and Burroughs and Bukowski – all of them the toast of Paris in their day. Here, murk is it. Murk’s the Great Tradition. It’s their history and their dirty conscience. In the soul of every French writer there’s a…’
‘There’s a Quartier Pigalle.’*6
‘…Yes. But you’re safe with me, my dear. You now enjoy the protection of my proud Nordic blood.’
‘Nordic? You mean Celtic. You mean your proud Welsh blood.’
This was a frequent tease. According to Elena, he ‘was born in the heart of Wales’ (rather than in Oxford) and could trace his lineage back, on both sides, to Owen Glendower, or Owain Glyndŵr, who flourished in the fourteenth century.
‘I’m no Taff. I’m no Gael. I’m a true-blue Anglo-Saxon. Pur, Elena.’
‘Mm. Remember what Hilly said about you and Hitler? It’s what made you right about him.*7 Guilt Anyway, all countries have done terrible things. You know what I did? I kidnapped and enslaved Africans to work the land I stole from the Indians.’
‘No, put that way it doesn’t sound very nice. But you didn’t do all that in 1940.’
‘I killed millions of South East Asians around 1970.’
‘And I killed nearly a million Indian Indians in 1947. Breakneck partition. I did terrible things. But I didn’t do them in England. Jean-Jacques did terrible things right here in the City of Light. While Fritz looted his shops and fucked his women.’
‘Fritz fucked them all. Anyway I love Jean-Jacques because he gave me my prize.’
‘Oh yeah, I meant to ask. Did he give you any money as well?’
‘Yup. Five thousand euros. It’s already spent.’ And she frowned sorrowfully, saying, ‘I bought a hideous dress last week.’
…For a year or two in the later 1970s, many women and quite a few men used to claim with a straight face that all men and all women were basically interchangeable (this was ‘equalitarian feminism’ in its idealist form). Now, no man has ever said or would ever say, I bought a hideous suit last week. He might very well have bought a hideous suit last week, but he wouldn’t say it (because he wouldn’t think it – because he wouldn’t know it). I took Elena’s hand and elongated its little finger.
‘I am you and you are me. It’s almost time, El. Pinkies clenched for Shock and Awe.’
‘Pinkies clenched for Shock and Awe…Now let’s read for a while.’
A fly was staring at me from the tabletop. Being a fly, it was in the heraldic posture we may call ‘crappant’ (this was the coinage of a certain contemporary poet famed among other things for his descriptions of urban dogs). The wet, viscid linoleum surface combined with the insect’s suction pads to root it in place. Stale beer was probably of some interest to flies, but there was nothing here to engage their deepest fascination, no shit or blood or death.
Did they have ‘horseholders’ at Verdun? He remembered the horseholder from another book, and the night under shellfire: ‘What can one man do with four terrified horses? If shells burst behind they lunge forward. If shells burst ahead they go back on their haunches, nearly pulling your arms out of their sockets. A week in the front-line trenches is better than one night as a horseholder under shellfire.’ Eight million horses were killed in the First World War, and at Verdun 7,000 were killed in one day…
With every line of their bodies eloquent of innocence,
